FlimFlamm

The principle you espouse of more stuff being available is sound, but there is a reasonable limit. If battleships were available, let's say, via construction in shipyards by survivors who mine and smelt and refine their own steel. It should take a group of 50 survivors (the whole server) twenty years to even come close to completing the work on the hull of a battleship. Once they get it up and sailing, how are they going to arm it? What are they going to do with it? Video games of the future might have the luxury of having anything and everything imaginable in them (maybe they can become educational tools), but for today we have data limits and such, so I lean more towards only having available that which is reasonably plausible*. *reasonably plausible is a very ambiguous term, and intentionally so. Some people think that a glider or an ultralight or an autogyro is beyond the scope of feasibility in a zombie apocalypse, which I thoroughly disagree with. When it comes to anything larger, the issue becomes about sacrificing fidelity to statistical realism (the feasibility of finding/maintaining/building larger aircraft) versus the fact that it is a video game, and we want video games to have fun things in them. Then there is the they are too overpowered crowd... (I am actually finding this subject very entertaining because it very much like politics :) )

I think you need to flesh out this argument you are using, because I think it is deeply flawed. P1: imbalanced things are not good in videogames P2: DayZ is a videogames P2: Aircraft are imbalanced C1: Aircraft are not good in DayZ Firstly I want to know what you mean by "imbalanced" in and of itself. What is the exact problem that imbalanced things (as you define them) create in videogames. Secondly, I want you explain how the problems of imbalance in video games as you define them will apply directly to DayZ.(Are there any comparisons you can make between potential DayZ imbalance and imbalance in other games?). For example, A mosin with a scope is a pretty powerful thing. If you are on the coast you have almost no hope of defeating someone with a mosin who wants to kill you and knows where you are at. I could argue that mosins give an unfair advantage which is a direct threat to my survival as a bambi. Does this make them imbalanced in such a way that they ought not to exist in DayZ? Thirdly, I want to know in what precise ways particular types of aircraft are going to give rise to imbalance as you define it, in a context that makes sense as it applies to DayZ, which is a unique video game where 'imbalance' can mean something very different than what it means in other games. (different types of aircraft can do different things, so not all of them have the same level of 'balance') I disagree with the premise that aircraft are inherently imbalanced. Autogyros or ultralights give people convenient transport at an expense, nothing more. I disagree that DayZ can have something be in and of itself, 'imbalanced'. The more powerful something is, the more difficult it needs to be to acquire. For example, I would be fine with stinger missiles in the game if finding them was literally one in ten million. That way, no matter how much of an advantage it gives you, it is still balanced based on rarity/expense. This kind of balance keeps all the other shit relevant and prevents people from only going for one type of gun, or one model of vehicle. I disagree that DayZ, for the above reason, can be easily compared with many other games in terms of how things can be 'balanced'. I think you falsely presume that all aircraft are overpowered (chinooks and blacks are overpowered, i get that, but those are the pinnacle of modern military aircraft which would not fit into DayZ), and then go on to equivocate over-powered-ness with imbalance as it would cause in some games which cannot be easily applied to DayZ. I think you were onto that fact when you explained that a zombie apocalypse is not fair and balanced, but you failed to provide actual specifics which explain and prove your argument as it applies to DayZ.

In war you get a shit ton of patients. You get them all at once. So not only do you have the extreme emotional and mental pressure of everything being life and death, but you also have an incredible volume of work to do. This environment motivates surgeons as much as possible and the severity of work volume makes it so that they become extremely practiced. The faster and more precisely a surgeon can operate (meaning more time for more patients also means a better experience for the guy being operated on because the surgeon will need to spend less time inside of them). It's not that you are expected to lose patients which makes it a good learning environment, it's actually inevitably losing patients and the learning that occurs from it. I wasn't applying the original quote to vehicle maintenance specifically but more so experience in general. One poster was suggesting that we have experience levels that we need to grind with each life, like mechanics skills, medical skills, farming skills etc... I rebuked him by focusing on the same realism mantra that he kept repeating. In real life there are no experience points or leveling systems. When it comes to surgeons raw experience of actually doing surgery is what makes them excel. When it comes to mechanics, actually doing mechanical work gives you experience in the same way. When it comes to piloting, it's the same thing. Real experience is what makes you good. There is a game called SS13 (space station thirteen). It is a round based space horror survival role playing game. Dean notably used it as an example in the early days of the standalone in order to explain how he wanted the immersiveness of the game to work. In SS13, like in DayZ, if you are sick, you might simply get a message which hints at that fact: "Your throat throbs with pain". Players who do not understand the intricate medical system of SS13 might ignore it, and continue romping around the station, all the while spreading their disease. To actually play as a doctor, there is required a ridiculous amount of learning to even have the first clue about treating disease and injury. In order to go from being a civilian on board the station (a completely uneducated naive who knows nothing about anything and is good only for assault and vandalism and getting locked up in the brig) players need to spend sometimes years learning and mastering all the aspects and mechanics of their profession and department. For example, if you are engineer, and you want to deconstruct a reinforced wall, you need to apply tools to it in the following order: Wirecutters, Screwdriver, Welding Torch, Crowbar, Wrench, Welding Torch, Crowbar, Screwdriver, Wirecutters, Wrench. People who cannot remember how to do it can look it up on the wiki, but it is tiresome and laborious to do so. Nothing in the game tells you what to do next or how to do it, and just about everything in the game is much more complex than simply deconstructing a wall. In DayZ, knowing how to construct certain things, how health and medicine works, how to properly maintain vehicles, and it is my hope, how to build, maintain, and fly light aircraft, should be as complex and as diverse/dynamic as possible. In this way the difficulty of the game will naturally create different play styles which focus on dedication towards specific things (like medicine, base building, mechanics, or piloting) because mastering any one field would be so difficult that people would not have time or patience to master them all.

So your two fold argument is as follows: aircraft create unfair advantages, and even though the game should not be fair, it needs to be somewhat fair, or 'it won't go anywhere'. And also that because Chernarus is poor that aircraft would not be around. In what way would aircraft in and of themselves be so game breakingly over powered? Why would it be unfair if the difficulty to construct or maintain aircraft reflected the benefits they grant? How exactly is the experience of teh bambi or the lonewolf going to be ruined because there are a few light aircraft buzzing around? Also, there are three airfields in Chernarus, two of them are military airfields. Parts can reasonably be assumed to exist within Chernarus. That said, I would prefer to see constructable DIY makeshift aircraft instead of prefab spawned ones (which is more realistic than spawned in ones, and less powerful) which would rely on mostly improvised and homemade parts. P.S The Czech republic isn't a poor nation, which is where Chernarus is located. They have the 50th largest GDP in the world.

How is this even a rational response? All you're doing is pissing and moaning about how badly you do not want aircraft. Stinger missiles can destroy modern jets. they aren't needed to shoot down light aircraft. Why stop at M240? Because it's possible to shoot down light aircraft without going nuclear.

This is why I am in support of MG nests with tripod mounted MG's being constructable. Their primary purpose being defensive. The caliber of the mountable MG's needs to reflect the relative balance of everything else, so I am leaning towards m240's and PKT's given that this is what I would expect enemy aircraft to be carrying. If a 50 Mg is added like the M2 then it should be only firable when mounted, can only be carried strapped to your back (and must be carried separately from the tripod). Ammo for it should be rare enough to reflect its strength. If you are about to open fire from an M2 at an aircraft then you should not want to waste even a single precious bullet.

All you really need is a 7.62 MG which you basically have in the form of an AKM. An M240 would work. The more lightly armored and flimsy an aircraft is, the more getting anywhere near something that is going to shoot at you is suicide.

I will number my replies as they correspond to your numbered points. 1) small aircraft don't always require hydraulic fluid. Many of them require the exact same caliber of parts that land vehicles commonly require. One of the good things about 98% of al humans dying is that there are all kinds of leftover products everywhere. I don't need an icnredible amount of resources to gather parts that I could concievably use to build a makeshift biplane, autogyro, or DIY mozzie type helicopter. 2) Guns that are not standard revolvers or long rifles are actually pretty complicated. Being able to shoot one is one thing, being able to shoot one accurately is another, and finally understanding gunfighting tactics, positioning and flanking is something else entirely. The average person doesn't know how to clean load and attatch a drum mag to an AK but I have no problem with this. It's something that can be learned. Vehicle mechanics involve many of the same mechanics as aircraft. Engine maintenance is the most important and complicated part of maintaining either a plane or a car, and if you understand car engines then understanding aircraft engines is not far fetched at all. The design of the plane is the most important part of the thing, but simple bi planes are reliable and stable formats that people used to build from scratch so long as they had an engine. 3) I'm not talking about Chernarus lore, I'm talking about what people loved about the mod. Many people loved to be pilots. They had reputations as good pilots and as such were the designated pilot whenever aircraft were needed. Having a real skill requirement for flying aircraft does away with the stupidity of experience points and grinding systems and replaces it with actual experience. Just like what happens with the rest of the features and aspects of the game. 4) Minecraft is a good game that I can use to demonstrate why I think experience systems are trash, especially for games aiming for so called realism. In minecraft, with the addition of thousands of complicated mods, and dynamic and versatile/modular elements of gameplay like redstone, what happened is that you had some players who were hard working and dedicated, and learned how to use the tools they are given in awesome and unexpected ways. Most players would kill mobs, build a hovel, hand mine for diamond, and then make friends and enemies with their neighbours. Other people, more cunning and clever people, decided that they were going to become masters of the tools they were given, and they therefore vastly outshined the regular naives who either didn't have the patience, intelligence, or desire to become a competent survivor. In minecraft there was really no special experience or level system. When you died, much like in DayZ, you respawned fresh and had to in some ways start over. Your base was only as secure as you could hide it or build traps to defend it. How industrious you could become depended on the player, not on how much superficial time they put into grinding stat levels. Some people were hopeless and good for only a few tasks, others were masters of everything. Not because there was some sort of flaw in the game design, but because they themselves were exceptional. Flying airplanes or helicopters in sims is incredibly hard at first, but if you have the right patience and aptitude you can master it. I hope that everything in DayZ is so complicated and difficult to achieve (like minecraft came to be) that the heights you can soar to depend solely upon your own will power and ingenuity. 5) The mechanics of a V3S engine aren't too much more complex than the mechanics of plane engines (small ones made out of cheap materials). The same mechanical skills that will become prevalent will also be appllicable to most aspects of aircraft. 6) The major flaw in your argument here is that a 2% random sampling of the population will have the same proportion of pilots as there are in a 100% analysis. There will be SOME pilots and SOME engineers and mechanics who understand planes, and so the knowledge has a chance to enter the mainstream. My point was that people who are both immune, and have survived for some time already (meaning not being killed by zombies) are going to be on average more skillfull than the original 2% immune group. The strongest and smarted of the 2% will survive, and given that more and more are dying each day, soon we might be down to the people who do have these special knowledges, like how to fly a plane, or sail a ship, or build/maintain an engine. Everytime you die you can imagine that a less experienced survivor who came ashore did not make it. Your new character, being more knowledgable (from your personal experience, but role play wise that is just their background) ought to be better off, having survived for longer (given a realistic timeline where the old character is dead while the 'new' one goes on living in the future). 8)You don't need a small nation state. You only need the materials, tools, and knowledge required. Generators can power the tools. Manuals, books, guides, improvisation and general mechanical experience can provide the rest. I'm not suggesting that big ass helicopters resembling modern day helicopters with their precise electronics. I'm suggesting classically timed and mechanized helicopters of reasonable proportions and size. Anything bigger than a 4 seater strains the realism of maintenance and construction (for bigger helicopters you need higher quality parts). You might not be aware but small helicopters, complex as they are, are feasible projects for individuals, not just nation states. Here is some russian flying his homemade helicopter Planes are also doable with the right knowledge, and so your desire for fidelity for having knowledge of physics and mechanics be limited to some statistical norm strikes me as very odd when videogames are mostly about filling roles that you cannot in real life.

You should learn the ways of the improvised bow. You can make a improvised knife from a rock on the coast, find a boat for rope and rain gear. Then you can craft bows and arrows!

This video is the perfect example of the kind of aircraft that are completely doable. So what if it's risky?

Who gives a flying fuck whether or not you need certification in order to do legal plane maintenance. I could read a book on a particular plane and have a general enough understanding of it to do some maintenance. Just because you need a certificate as per safety protocol doesn't mean I cannot learn about planes in a zombie apocalypse. The only reason why you need a certificate to work on a plane is because people will crash and die if you screw up. You can be a laymen mechanic for a car all you want because when you find out something is installed incorrectly you aren't about to die. Small planes simply do not require an insane amount of maintenance. If you understand the engine (which requires the most maintenance)then flaps, elevators and ailerons are relatively simple mechanical apparatuses. Your argument is literally crap. Most people don't know how to operate firearms. Most people don't know how to do effective agriculture. Most people don't know anything about ground vehicle mechanics. Most people cannot make a splint to fix their own broken legs. Most people cannot do blood tests, or give and receive blood infusions. Most people don't know how to install, repair or maintain a lawnmower engine let alone a V3S. Most people are either physically or mentally unfit to do most of the things that the features of DayZ allow you to do. There is a very large difference between recreational/makeshift aircraft than there is between people who own private jets and corporate helicopters. Recreational aircraft are smaller and usually more dangerous statistically speaking. People who like to fly small planes and recreational light aircraft like autogyros don't need to be rich or to own a shit ton of land that requires or merits air-travel. They do it because it is within the realm of their knowledge, economic affordability, and their pursuit of happiness. Given however that Chernarus is a deadly place where you starve in hours and are likely to get murdered, flying can become about improving travel safety. There are plenty of industrial sites and airfields in chernarus, so resources aren't really a problem. As I already explained earlier, the average person is a consumer who relies totally on specialized service industries for actually getting things done. Most people cannot do something so simple as set a snare. So your vision, for a totally realistic survival game where the un-dead magically roam would create a game where people run around for several minutes looking for soda pop, beans, and a can opener (or else they wont be able to open it, as per your average person bit), until they inevitably run into a zombie, and because they likely have no experience with guns or self defence, they get killed by the zombie. Sounds like a really boring and shitty game to me man. I feel like you have a very narrow view of what human beings are capable of adapting to. When the zombie apocalypse hits, not every pilot or mechanic is going to be at the airport, and some airports are going to be overrun. Hospitals are going to be instantly overrun, and 'doctors' might hope to escape the hospital on foot, but they certainly aren't piling into a chinook with all the worlds pilots and mechanics on the roof. Hippocrates, some old greek person that the average person doesn't know about, said that war is the only proper school for surgeons. What did he mean by this? Well, in war (or in zombie apocalypse survival) you are continuously thrust into difficult situations for which you have no applicable certificates. You are forced to do or die, and you end up gaining experience on the spot; a lot of experience. In fact you gain so much experience and skill by being forced into a real world environment that you wonder how you could ever have learned anything at all in a classroom. Important knowledge like how to fly aircraft, how to maintain them. Medical knowledge surrounding setting bones and suturing wounds, even blood transfusion will be something that everyone will need to learn eventually. Mechanical and engineering skills will be among he most heavily prized and shared fields of knowledge that people who want to survive are going to need to expose themselves to. In addition to this, the people who survive and actually make it as far as the freshly spawned bambis supposedly have are already going to be people who had the correct skills to survive that long in the first place. Boat captains, drivers, mechanics, doctors, men with military knowledge; these are going to be more represented in the survivors of an apocalypse than the average person of today.

I am running round in a town right now, food everywhere. I just found a sword immediately after finding a chainsaw. It two hits zombies! There is food galore. Cows in the field. Cans of food and rice are plenty. I keep finding powdered milk in broken pickup trucks. There is soda-pop everywhere (gotta have my rasputin kvauss). Basically you need to make a stone knife, make a bow, make some arrows, and travel inland to a non coastal city while killing any animals you see along the way for food (supposing you cannot get food at the coast). If the server you are on has absolutely no loot on it then try a different one. Some of them are like that. I have food stored along with extra clothing and weapons. I just need to find that elusive leather sewing kit so I can finish my fancy leather suit. P.S If you ever die of dehydration, you are not good at surviving at all. You can drink straight from well pumps which are located literally everywhere across the map. When you first spawn with full blood you can drink your fill from a dirty pond with low risk of cholera. P.P.S If you find a shovel you can dig a plot in the forest (not sure if it works elsewhere) and instead of planting vegetables like some idiot might, just open inventory screen over the plot and collect the worms, and eat them all. You can even prepare them somehow but I haven't tried that yet on the count of I am a man and men eat worms when they are hungry and stuff.

The mods are going to fill every niche desire that people want, but it is still very important for the basic game to have enough content to hold an audience and so that the mods don't have to do all the cool stuff themselves. The way vehicles get implemented in vanilla standalone, the way they spawn or are constructed, the way they are maintained, and the types of vehicles available is going to be the starting point for most mods. Having an already established diverse and dynamic vehicle system that works is going to be crucial to the success of any mods which feature additional vehicles. This is why I am petitioning for a truly constructable/modular vehicle system. We need vehicles to be dynamic and have as many options and variable parts as possible so we can make them our own.

But they're simply not. Small planes require little maintenance. Small helicopters require maintenance but it is feasible with the right know-how. I'm willing to stretch 'what realistically would survivors be able to do skill wise' in order to promote a versatile and enjoyable game. How about you?

Jets and large helicopters are beyond the realistic maintenance limits of the DayZ scope. Small planes however like cessnas are not maintenance hogs. Older model planes like bi planes of various kinds, and recreational grade gliders like ultralights and autogyros are well within the maintenance capabilities of a post apocalyptic zombie world. If you are a survivor off the beach getting something together should be impossible. If you have an established and a group of teammates who have been scavenging and hoarding parts and resources then there are all kinds of things that can be built. All you really need to get airborne is a para-sail, a small engine, and a home-made propeller. The most complex plane that could possibly be built would be some sort of bi plane with improvised everything. The most complex helicopter that could be built would be a renovated huey sized helicopter or some sort of death trap makeshift little bird sized helicopter. Auto gyros and mozzies aren't rocket science. Only aeronautical science. It doesn't matter to me much that the average person doesn't know how to design a plane that can actually fly, or that building a helicopter requires a degree of precision that can only be had with the correct tools and knowledge. All I care about is that I can pretend that I know all that, and then invest inordinate amounts of time into completing it so I can enjoy it for those few precious hours (or minutes?) before it goes all wrong and we all die in a firey wreck so some lucky bambi can come buy and pick through the wreckage. As an aside, the more difficult it is to fly the aircraft, the more realistic the game will be along the lines of your argument that the average person is not a pilot. In the DayZ mod helicopters were easy to fly. They all had auto hover and generally were simple as shit. Even still, some people just suck at flying. They crash land constantly after spending ages descending. They cannot maneuver for shit and you're lucky if you don't die as a result of your decision to enter the aircraft in the first place. Take autogyros for instance. These were the things in the DayZ mod that looked like a mozzie (a small 1 person helicopter) but they flew like a glider or a plane. Almost nobody could fly them. I could fly them though, with extreme prowess because I was dedicated enough to study and practice with them endlessly. Whenever my autogyro was stolen I knew that they would simply crash and burn a few hundred meters away. As a skilled pilot I was a valuable commodity for a group of players. I could land cessnas and bi planes along the coast with ease and could defend against enemy helicopters with an armed CAMEL or other bi plane. Other people filled their roles as well. Some were base builders, some were fighters, some liked to drive ground vehicles, and some people liked to be gunners. Once I learned how to survive in the DayZ mod, piloting aircraft, for any reason, became the most enjoyable part of the game for me. Most people liked to go on murder sprees or do clan battles or build bases and live peacefully, but I liked to fly. Survival was easy in the dayz mod and so players had more time to engage in war against one another. In the standalone there is more to do and more roles which are crucial like farming/resource gathering; more roles to fill. Aircraft will be hard to get and so players will mostly be inexperienced with any given aircraft. Given the value aircraft will represent, groups who collaborate to construct/maintain them will want to be sure that qualified pilots are flying them. Why not have aircraft of a reasonable tech level and of appropriate difficulty to acquire in order to allow for this dynamic role? What is the real sacrifice other than to statistical fidelity? Would the game honestly be more fun if there was absolutely no access to flight? (I cannot imagine how that is possible. More options=more fun right?)

You make a good point. Regardless of what actually gets added into the game it can be balanced based on difficulty to acquire/rarity and ammo rarity/caliber. Things can also be balanced by adding effective AA MG's to counter the MG's of any aircraft if they become too prevalent. What I want out of DayZ is to be able to play it the way I want to. Rocket said that he wants to give us the tools to do what we want. Well he has given us a set of tools that you can find in game, but he still needs to give us numerous and diverse options on what we can actually then do with them. Having absolutely as many variations on vehicles as possible will not only vastly increase the realism and immersive nature of the game but it will also keep it fun, innovative and exciting as players find/construct/use vehicles according to their own desires.

I have a very similar opinion except for a few things. C-38's (jets of any kind) are just too big. Mi-17's are also perhaps, too big. For realism's sake they are too hard to maintain. Hueys are the perfect combination of size, technology level (maybe they are slightly too complex to maintain, but who cares), and armaments. A modular makeshift helicopter around the size of a huey armed with m240's should be the pinnacle of aircraft. An M134 is simply too powerful. It takes thousands of 5.56 rounds... PKT's and M240's are the perfect caliber. Pretty much cannot go wrong with them in terms of balance.

Generally helicopters can always just fly away, and even if you had an armed helicopter you would want to fly away. Having guns will be enough to deter lone wolves with guns from attacking a helicopter, but any more than one ground target and the situation becomes strategically untenable for any lightly armed aircraft. basically it is a safety measure when landing. With no guns on board people can prevent you from even trying to land by threatening the landing zone, even if it is your own base. It is about being able to at least return fire to enemy ground targets. The main difference will be aircraft vs aircraft action. An unarmed aircraft will need to flee before an armed one and will not be able to stalk armed aircraft for fear of being shot at. When you have a bunch of aircraft in the air, but they cannot do anything to one another, then people can be annoying by endlessly following one another, and eventually will resort to kamakazie tactics.

In DayZ standalone we currently have the V3S and like the original DayZ mod, it currently spawns in random locations. This severely limits reliable access to vehicles which was one of the major issues of the original DayZ mod. Secondary mods like Epoch and Overwatch (for the original DayZ mod) became much more popular because of basebuilding and because of the reliable access to vehicles. The availability of vehicles on original DayZ mod servers depended on the settings of the server (usually jacked up very high so there would be as many vehicles as possible) but on many servers finding a vehicle was a matter or pure luck. (finding them and keeping them was not stable or reliable or consistent in any way) In order to address the problem of vehicle availability, it should be the case that an assortment of makeshift vehicles be made constructable from the ground up. The most simple makeshift vehicle should be a small 1-2 person buggy built off of a modular small frame. In order to build the frame there should be some resource collection involved, and then in order to complete the vehicle should require an engine (can be modular, meaning numerous types of engines), wheels (can be modular, meaning different types of tire and different handling on/off road), and some sort of auxilliary parts like siding/armor (can be modular in terms of weight/armor level which will affect overall speed of the vehicle) Players will need to gather some sort of metal, an engine, engine parts, wheels, and other miscellaneous crap, which alone might be a fairly laborious process, and the result could be something like this: The buggy would behave in speed/handling according to the engine and wheels and overall weight, and once the frame breaks due to damage will become wreckage (perhaps partially salvageable) and will dissappear on a server restart (along with any salvagable parts). It is possible to make the requirements for actually building a buggy like this such that you basically need a team and a base in order to accumulate all the tools, parts, and raw resources required to complete the assembly. It doesn't really matter to me how easy or difficult it is, so long as it is available it will give me something to dedicate my time to that has a tangable reward. A bigger makeshift vehicle could be constructed in a similar way while requiring more resources, better engines, etc... If the nature of parts onto frames of various sizes becomes modular (as I believe was promised) then there should be no reason that we cannot craft silly vehicles on car sized frames: Whether or not a V3S sized vehicle is realistically constructable or should even be constructable is something that I have reservations about. I think that we can have these modular vehicles ontop of the ones that randomly spawn as a way to supplement the availability of things like the V3S. While they are not meant to replace the value of a real vehicle like the V3S, they give survivors something to do which is going to create and endless amount of fun. When it comes to aircraft, building your own plane or helicopter is not easy, but with just a little bit of knowhow it is highly doable. for example: or even better, THE DREADED, TWO PERSON AUTO GYRO!!!! The main problem I seek to address with this concept is the issue of needing to hunt endlessly for fully spawned vehicles and then when something happens to it you are screwed and need to start the endless hunt over again. In order to play with friends and groups without hours upon hours of walking vehicles are a requirement. People so heavily favored things like epoch and overpoch to the original DayZ mod because if they had a group then they could be sure of reasonably reliable access to transportation, without which traveling from one side of the map to the other becomes to time consuming and I can say from experience that all that walking and walking and walking is quite boring.

Regarding aircraft. I am firmly of the opinion that there needs to be a basic version which players with time investment can reliably gain access to. One of the most important reasons why the game will need aircraft is because when you have a base you require convenient transport to and from it. Without the convenience of air transport bases do not get used frequently and serve as storage sheds rather than compounds of safety. The hassle of getting there and then traveling elsewhere takes up too much time. We are already going to be spending enough time doing everything required to build and maintain bases while surviving, so the labor of traveling there should be made easy once a base is established and affluent.

Ultralights are a perfect example of the types of aircraft that would be heavily employed in a zombie apocalypse. They are completely reasonable projects to build, and the only opposition that players have toward them is the nonsense about map size and how people think flight is too powerful or immersion breaking. If anything it is more immersive. The skies are the end game along with bases, which as an aside, without having aircraft to get to and from, are pretty useless.

Almost nobody is supporting the idea of chinooks, black hawks, or military jets. Obviously they would be ridiculously powerful and would not fit into DayZ. What would fit into DayZ are light aircraft and lightly armed aircraft. If there are going to be aircraft, then there should be at least some variations which have the capacity to defend themselves, otherwise no matter what aircraft you fly they are constant and complete liabilities. At least if an aircraft is lightly armed it has a chance at defending itself when ambushed. Shooting at someone from a helicopter (or even worse, a plane) is much more difficult than shooting at a helicopter from the ground. Unless the helicopter is a black hawk with M2's or M134's you can take cover and return fire much more safely than a helicopter can openly engage ground targets. If a clan is flying around killing fresh spawns that means ammo is too easy to get because they are wasting it for no reward. As long as aircraft cannot be equipped with ultra high rapid fire or ultra high caliber machine guns then they literally pose a negligible threat to any ground crew. The only threat that lightly armed aircraft pose is a threat to other aircraft. If we're going to have aircraft, they might as well have the capacity to fight one another. Why not? Dogfighting requires immense flying skill and fighting in general is one of the attractions of DayZ. Lightly armed aircraft engaging in skirmishes and dogfights is the most fun I have ever had playing DayZ. Crash landing after losing a fight and the ensuing survival situation, being potentially in enemy territory, with limited supplies, and cut off from teammates and reinforcements is the truest and most dynamic/interesting survival situation that the DayZ mod had to offer. I want aircraft to be hard to get and easy to shoot down. I want their effectiveness to depend greatly upon the skill and strategy of the pilot. I yearn again for the days when hearing a ground vehicle approaching wasn't the most interesting or exciting thing that could possibly happen.

I see so many people objecting for piss poor reasons. Just because you cannot envision aerial transport fitting into your 'survivalish senses' doesn't mean it is not a good Idea. Nobody wants to play a game where the end goal is to not die of starvation. People are going to be building bases and having all kinds of ground transport, so why not air transport? You people think having sniper wars is about survival? Give me a break. That average people cannot fly planes or helicopters is an even more terrible reason to not have them. Why should we only allow things in DayZ that average people have the knowledge for in real life? We play video games for a reason, some us obviously for different ones. Shoot em up games are plenty, which is just what DayZ is without aircraft. So while you all sit here talking about how adding additional content to the game is going to ruin your petty visions for DayZ's future I'm going to be realistic and lobby for things which will make DayZ a lastingly fun game to play instead of a fucking hiking and sniping simulator that gets old and dies in less than a year after release.

When the devs said that vehicles were going to be modular, what exactly did they mean? Are we going to be able to build them from the ground up? Are we going to have to find them already spawned in and then add stuff to them? Personally I think there should be a variety of vehicles that players with enough resources and the right tools can construct from the ground up, with different engines, tires, chassis, which all affect the behavior/performance of the vehicle. Here is my suggestion thread for what I have personally envisioned: http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/223703-modular-vehicles-what-are-they/

So here is my input and my argument: On armed aircraft: My experience comes from played thousands of hours of chernarus DayZ mod, with vehicles and vehicle availability ranging from one random little bird for the entire server, to vendors dispensing chinooks and black hawks left and right. Fully modern militarized aircraft are at many times too much. Black hawks and chinooks wrecking bases with M134 gats are too powerful and too unrealistic for the fidelity of the DayZ standalone. In such servers around 30% of the game was about survival and the other 70% about heavy warfare which was not exactly the best DayZ experience the mod had to offer. Some servers heavily restricted the type of aircraft that could be acquired, with the huey for example being rare or expensive and being the best you could hope for. While having the huey and having ammo for it was fairly powerful with their M240's 7.62's (IIRC), the limited nature of ammo and the rarity of the huey made it so that it was not game breaking or overpowered to have on a server. Aircraft with very rare/hard to get/expensive ammunition, or low impact ammunition (like 7.62 relatively speaking if helicopters can support shooting out of the doors like people do in real life) make it so that ground forces cannot be completely dominated by armed aircraft (in fact taking fire from the ground means you should probably flee or your heli will be damaged/destroyed). The main threat that a huey poses that an unarmed aircraft does not pose is the ability to follow and extort or shoot at enemy aircraft. Having the right balance of expense/availability and therefore liability versus the physical advantages that aircraft give you is important in order to promote versatile play-styles. Servers with unarmed but relatively accessible aircraft were alright, but the end game consisted of ground assaults on enemy positions with aerial extractions only. Once people were in the air you could follow them but that is it. One typical strategy that emerged was using cheap aircraft occupied by a single pilot as a suicide missile against more expensive and more occupied enemy aircraft. Having no guns was less interesting in my opinion, and it had a massive impact on the absolute endgame, which was inter-group warfare. On Aircraft themselves: The main usage of aircraft has always been picking up re-spawned teammates from the coast, and traveling persons or resources from point A to point B. Engaging in combat with armed aircraft was usually a rare thing reserved for the most affluent clans and bases which could afford to do so. The convenience of being picked up from the cost, or reducing travel time does not in and of itself change the basics of DayZ. Players who operate aircraft need to worry about fuel and maintenance, they need to have saved and stored resources like medicines and food, they need to constantly worry about security. Most importantly, in order to actually use/construct a helicopter, players will need to have already mastered many or most of the basic fundamentals of DayZ, which we are all reminded of every time we die and re-spawn as a fresh bambi. I voted yes to aircraft of all kinds, but I don't want 2000 round M134's or even necessarily any 50 cal MG's on any aircraft. Instead I want limited caliber options (7.62 area being a good standard) but I do want a diverse range of buildable craft. Auto gyros, small bi planes or cessnas, and small to medium helicopters with light guns simply add to the options of the game without breaking anything via mega powerful full military aircraft.